‘How Much Gold in Them There Stars?’—The Curve of Growth

Abstract

At the beginning of this book I recounted August Comte’s classic claim that chemical knowledge of the stars was something that mankind would never possess. Unfortunately forMonsieur Comte, not only have astronomers learned to recognise different chemical elements in stars, they have also often managed to determine how much of each element is present. The actual amount of a given element which is present in the atmosphere of a star or indeed throughout the Universe as a whole is called its abundance, so let’s first see how the abundance of an element is quantified.